Sunday, October 26, 2008

So the McCain campaign won’t let go of Joe the Plumber. He’s still being trotted out in speeches by McCain and Palin. They mention again and again how Obama wants to “spread” Joe’s wealth.

Aside from the condescension (yet again) implicit in McCain’s reduction of Joe to a stereotype (and leaving out any of the frenzied investigations into just who Joe really is), I want to look a little closer at what the Joe the Plumber rhetoric really means.

Joe, of course, is white. He’s from Ohio, a state connected with middle-American whiteness, as opposed to the cities that McCain likes to emphasize in reference to Obama (”I don’t need any advice from a…Chicago politician!”).